Allowing persons to make an informed choice about their participation in research is a pre-eminent ethical and legal requirement. Almost universally, this requirement has been addressed through the provision of written patient information sheets and consent forms. Researchers and others have raised concerns about the extent to which such forms—particularly given their frequent lengthiness and complexity—provide participants with the tools and knowledge necessary for autonomous decision-making. Concerns are especially pronounced for certain participant groups, such as persons with low literacy and (...) Indigenous persons. Multimedia strategies have the potential to usefully supplement current consent practices in Australia; however, information is needed about the need for supplementary consent practices, along with drivers for and barriers against adoption. This study initiates the required evidence base through an audit of informed consent practices for medical research in the Australian state of Tasmania to assess the need for, and current uptake of, supplementary consent strategies. Drivers for and barriers against adoption of multimedia consent practices were explored in detail through interviews with key stakeholders, including researchers, HREC chairs and members, and research participants, including Indigenous participants. (shrink)

Allowing persons to make an informed choice about their participation in research is a pre-eminent ethical and legal requirement. Almost universally, this requirement has been addressed through the provision of written patient information sheets and consent forms. Researchers and others have raised concerns about the extent to which such forms—particularly given their frequent lengthiness and complexity—provide participants with the tools and knowledge necessary for autonomous decision-making. Concerns are especially pronounced for certain participant groups, such as persons with low literacy and (...) Indigenous persons. Multimedia strategies have the potential to usefully supplement current consent practices in Australia; however, information is needed about the need for supplementary consent practices, along with drivers for and barriers against adoption. This study initiates the required evidence base through an audit of informed consent practices for medical research in the Australian state of Tasmania to assess the need for, and current uptake of, supplementary consent strategies. Drivers for and barriers against adoption of multimedia consent practices were explored in detail through interviews with key stakeholders, including researchers, HREC chairs and members, and research participants, including Indigenous participants. (shrink)

This Chapter provides a short undergraduate introduction to ethical and philosophical complexities surrounding the law’s attempt (or lack thereof) to regulate artificial intelligence. -/- Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed a simple thought experiment known as the paperclip maximizer. What would happen if a machine (the “PCM”) were given the sole goal of manufacturing as many paperclips as possible? It might learn how to transact money, source metal, or even build factories. The machine might also eventually realize that humans pose a (...) threat. Humans could turn the machine off at any point, and then it wouldn’t be able to make as many paperclips as possible! Taken to the logical extreme, the result is quite grim—the PCM might even start using humans as raw material for paperclips. -/- The predicament only deepens once we realize that Bostrom’s thought experiment overlooks a key player. The PCM and algorithms like it do not arise spontaneously (at least, not yet). Most likely, some corporation—say, Office Corp.—designed, owns, and runs the PCM. The more paperclips the PCM manufactures, the more profits Office Corp. makes, even if that entails converting some humans (but preferably not customers!) into raw materials. Less dramatically, Office Corp. may also make more money when PCM engages in other socially sub-optimal behaviors that would otherwise violate the law, like money laundering, sourcing materials from endangered habitats, manipulating the market for steel, or colluding with competitors over prices. The consequences are predictable and dire. If Office Corp. isn’t held responsible, it will not stop with the PCM. Office Corp. would have every incentive to develop more maximizers—say for papers, pencils, and protractors. -/- This chapter issues a challenge for tech ethicists, social ontologists, and legal theorists: How can the law help mitigate algorithmic harms without overly compromising the potential that AI has to make us all healthier, wealthier, and wiser? The answer is far from straightforward. (shrink)

Acidity, generated in hypoxia or hypermetabolic states, perturbs homeostasis and is a feature of solid tumors. That acid peripherally disperses lysosomes is a three‐decade‐old observation, yet one little understood or appreciated. However, recent work has recognized the inhibitory impact this spatial redistribution has on mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1), a key regulator of metabolism. This finding argues for a paradigm shift in localization of mTORC1 activator Ras homolog enriched in brain (RHEB), a conclusion several others have now independently (...) reached. Thus, mTORC1, known to sense amino acids, mitogens, and energy to restrict biosynthesis to times of adequate resources, also senses pH and, via dampened mTOR‐governed synthesis of clock proteins, regulates the circadian clock to achieve concerted responses to metabolic stress. While this may allow cancer to endure metabolic deprivation, immune cell mTOR signaling likewise exhibits pH sensitivity, suggesting that suppression of antitumor immune function by solid tumor acidity may additionally fuel cancers, an obstacle potentially reversible through therapeutic pH manipulation. (shrink)

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may (...) seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements. (shrink)

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective by William C. Mattison IIIRebekah EklundThe Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective William C. Mattison III NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. 290 pp. £75.00Undergirding this book is a principle from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: the "analogy of faith" or "the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves" (241). the (...) "truths of faith" under consideration are Matthew's sermon on the Mount (sM) and the virtue ethics of thomas aquinas. Mattison aims to restore the sM to a more prominent place in Catholic moral theology by demonstrating the convergence between the teachings of the sM and thomistic virtue ethics.In this endeavor, the book largely succeeds, even if it occasionally over-reaches—that is, the sM is always shown to be in perfect harmony with thomas's teachings on virtue ethics, in which some readers might see points of tension. For example, Mattison uses thomistic action theory to argue that the beatitudes (Mt 5:3–12) and the sM's concluding exhortations (Mt 7:13–29) both demonstrate an "intrinsic relationship" between action and eternal reward; that is, the "qualifying condition" (e.g., meekness) is itself constitutive of happiness and is thus an activity that continues in eternal life (22–25, 209, 221). Purity of heart works well in this framework, but Mattison struggles to make mourning fit. the thomistic lens determines the sense of the text: Whatever mourning is, it is an activity that must persist in heaven, limiting the options for interpretation.Mattison also aligns the seven virtues—faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude—with the seven beatitudes (following augustine's reduction of the beatitudes from eight to seven), with the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer, and with sections of the sM as a whole. these latter, broad pairings are not always easy to find. Mattison matches the beatitudes with the virtue of faith, and the six antitheses with the virtues of temperance and fortitude. the virtue of love pairs with Matthew 6:1–6, 16–18 (teachings on prayer, alms-giving, and fasting, sans the Lord's Prayer); prudence, with Matthew 6:19–34 (worry and money); justice, with Matthew 7:1–12 (judging, asking, the golden rule); and hope, with Matthew 7:13–29 (concluding warnings and exhortations).similarly, a virtue is assigned to each beatitude (47) and to each petition of the Lord's Prayer (252). In the case of the Lord's Prayer, Mattison insists on a particular order of the virtues, following aquinas's ordering (but reversing [End Page 207] temperance and fortitude). But he does not use the same order of virtues for the Beatitudes or for the broader alignments with the whole SM (the orders are completely different for all three lists), raising the question of why Aquinas's order matters for one set but not for the others.Mattison's alignments show both his indebtedness to patristic and medieval tradition and his innovation. Medieval commentators commonly matched sets of sevens (Beatitudes, virtues, vices, gifts of the Spirit), but (rather remarkably) none of them ever appears to have understood the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer as requests for the seven virtues, as Mattison does. Likewise, Mattison's alignment of the Beatitudes with the virtues follows the practice but not the substance of previous lists; his pairings match neither Ambrose's nor Aquinas's. I would have found a discussion of the differences helpful.The question is whether Mattison's alignments are fruitful or merely forced, and here readers may find the results to be mixed. Some are illuminating, such as the vice of presumption in relation to Matthew 7:21–23; others, such as the alignment of the six antitheses with the seven sacraments, "appear a bit of a 'stretch,'" as even Mattison admits (110).Overall, scholars and graduate students interested in Thomistic virtue ethics, and in the relationship between scripture and Catholic moral theology, will find much food for thought here.Rebekah EklundLoyola University MarylandCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The Agent-Causal Theory of Action claims that an event counts as an action when, and only when, it is caused by an agent. The central difference between the Causal Theory of Action (CTA) and the Agent-Causal view comes down to a disagreement about what sort of item (or items) occupies the left-hand position in the causal relation. For CTA, the left-hand position is occupied by mental items within the agent, typically construed in terms of mental events (e.g., belief/desire pairs or (...) intentions). For the agent-causal theory, it is the agent herself (that is, a substance) which does the causing. Agent-causal theorists generally concede that some intentional actions involve causal relations that are best understood in eventcausal terms. Such intentional actions are "nonbasic," meaning that the agent does them by doing something else. But for any "basic" intentional action—behavior that, according to the agent-causal theorist, is caused directly by the agent—there is a causal relation between the agent, on the one hand, and the action, on the other, which is (i) primitive (not permitting of analysis) and (ii) irreducible to any other relation (including, importantly, the event-causal relation). (shrink)

The complexity and inefficiency of the U.S. health care system complicates the distribution of life-saving medical technologies. When the public health is at stake, however, there are alternatives. The proposal for a national PrEP program published in this issue of the Journal applies some of the lessons of the national COVID vaccine campaign to HIV prevention. In doing so, it draws on other examples of public health approaches to the financing of medical technology, from vaccines for children to hepatitis C (...) treatment. (shrink)

Springer. We find in contemporary culture starkly contrasting estimates of the value of faith. On the one hand, for many people, faith is a virtue or positive human value, something associated with understanding, hope, and love, something to be inculcated, maintained, and cherished. On the other hand, for many people, faith is a vice, something associated with dogmatism, arrogance, and close-mindedness, something to be avoided at all costs. The papers included in this special (double) issue on approaches to faith explore (...) questions about faith in a variety of settings through a diverse range of examples, both secular and religious. The attempt to deepen our understanding of faith in the context of ordinary human relationships (e.g., between parents and children, friends, generals and their armies, business partners, citizens and the state), a commitment to ideals, or the pursuit of significant goals is clearly of general philosophical interest, as is the examination of potential connections between faith and topics such as trust or reliance. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that the more individuals view observable entities as animate, the more those entities are associated with having psychological and physiological experiences. This study examined the relationship between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for concepts of unobservable scientific (i.e., germ) and religious (i.e., God) entities. This study further explored how children's conceptions vary according to the social learning opportunities (i.e., discourse, rituals) parents reportedly create. Parent–child dyads with young children from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds participated. Three (...) central findings emerged. First, children readily associated God with psychobiological characteristics but did not do so to the same extent for germs. Second, children applied more psychobiological properties to both entity types when they believed that the entity was animate. Third, engaging in rituals and discourse with parents was indirectly related to children's concepts of God but not related to their concepts of germs. Overall, this study presented support for a connection between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for unobservable entities, and an indirect effect of cultural input on this reasoning. The implications of these findings will be discussed. (shrink)

This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants (...) were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing. (shrink)

Philosophers and ethicists have long neglected moral questions that arise from our interaction with non-human animals. Most assumed that human beings have a higher moral status than other animals, and that it is therefore morally permissible to use non-human animals as a source of food, clothing, and entertainment, and for scientific purposes. In recent decades, however, that assumption has been challenged, and the moral status of non-human animals is now the subject of a lively and controversial academic debate.Advances in sciences, (...) particularly the advent of evolutionary theory, made us realize that human beings and other animals are more similar than different, and force us to rethink our place in nature. We are no longer justified in thinking of ourselves as the crown of creation. We now understand that we are just one species among others, and we must ask ourselves anew – with an open and critical mind and without bias – which values and principles should guide our interaction with non-human animals, and how we should weigh our interests against those of other animals.Recognizing this important trend in moral thinking, the Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics invited me to edit a special issue on animal ethics. The interest was so great that one issue became two, of which this is the first. I am grateful to Professor Shamima Parvin Lasker and Ms. Tahera Ahmed for giving me the opportunity to serve as a guest editor, and for their assistance during the editing process. I also thank our contributors for choosing this journal to publish their excellent work, and the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.This, the first special issue on animal ethics contains the following five articles:Robin Attfield and Rebekah Humphreys (“Justice and Non-Human Animals”) challenge the widely held belief that non-human animals are not included within the scope of the principles of justice, and suggest that the interests of non-human animals sometimes take precedence over the interests of human beings. The implications of their argument for our interaction with other animals are profound: E.g., it is a matter of justice and fairness to prevent avoidable and unnecessary animal suffering, rather than a mere matter of compassion.Eric X. Qi (“Special Relations, Special Obligations, and Speciesism”) develops an account of the moral significance of special relations, and uses it to argue for a modest form of speciesism that steers a middle ground between anti-speciesism and crude speciesism. Unlike anti-speciesists, he maintains that species co-membership grounds special moral obligations among the members of the same species. In contrast to crude speciesists, however, he holds that our special obligations to fellow human beings do not warrant that we always attach more weight to their interests than to the comparable interests of non-human animals.Yamikani Ndasaukaand Grivas M. Kayange (“Existence and Needs: A case for the equal moral considerability of non-human animals”) argue that the existentialist view that human beings have a higher moral status than other animals rests on a weak foundation. They consider a number of arguments that have been made in support of this view and conclude that none of them holds up to critical scrutiny. They then suggest that human beings and other animals in fact deserve equal moral consideration, and – drawing from Martin Heidegger and Abraham Maslow – ground that claim in two important commonalities between them.Sreetama Chakraborty (“Animal Ethics: Beyond Neutrality, Universality, and Consistency”) explains how the postmodern approach to animal ethics departs from the traditional approach, particularly its emphasis on the principles of neutrality, universality, and consistency, and draws attention to the pernicious hierarchy of domination that separates human beings from other animals. Building on the insights of postmodernism, she takes first steps towards a new, non-anthropocentric paradigm, in the hope to achieve a sustainable balance between human interests and the interests of non-human animals.Gabriel Vidal Quiñones (“Singerian Vegetarianism and the Limits of Utilitarianism: A path towards a Meaning Ethics”) takes a critical look at Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument for vegetarianism, and argues that the conceptual resources of utilitarianism only allow for an incomplete moral understanding of our relationship with other animals. What is lacking, he suggests, is an ethical vision. He argues that, without an ethical vision, human action threatens to degenerate into mere automatism without meaning. He proposes a “meaning ethics” that he thinks is better equipped to help us decide how we ought to treat other animals.I hope you, dear reader, will enjoy reading through this remarkable collection of articles as much as I enjoyed putting it together. Maybe you will even be inspired to do some thinking of your own about issues of animal ethics and put your thoughts down on paper. If so, I sincerely hope that you will choose the Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics to publish your article.Warm regards and best wishes for the new year. (shrink)

Growing concern has been expressed that we have entered a “post-truth” era in which each of us willfully believes whatever we choose, aided and abetted by alternative and social media that spin alternative realities for boutique consumption. A prime example of the belief in alternative realities is said to be acceptance of “conspiracy theories”—a term that is often used as a pejorative to indict claims of conspiracy that are so obviously absurd that only the unhinged could believe them. The epistemological (...) standard often involved in this indictment, however—the standard of “obvious” falsity—invites subjectivity in its application, because what is obviously false to one person can be common sense to another. This is not just a truism; considerable research suggests that people’s political beliefs, in general, and their acceptance or rejection of conspiracy theories in particular, tends in large part to be determined by partisan, ideological, and other priors. (shrink)

The title of this paper reflects the fact truthmaking is quite frequently considered to be expressive of realism. What this means, exactly, will become clearer in the course of our discussion, but since we are interested in Armstrong’s work on truthmaking in particular, it is natural to start from a brief discussion of how truthmaking and realism appear to be associated in his work. In this paper, special attention is given to the supposed link between truthmaking and realism, but it (...) is argued that this link should not be taken too seriously, as truthmaking turns out to be, to a large extent, ontologically neutral. Some consequences of this are studied. (shrink)

It is now possible to have a child without sexual intercourse. The history of this apparently new statement has been breefly synthetised.The new perspectives open ethical problems for the scientific community and a new social context for single women.

The main aim of this paper is to introduce the logics of evidence and truth $$LET_{K}^+$$ and $$LET_{F}^+$$ together with sound, complete, and decidable six-valued deterministic semantics for them. These logics extend the logics $$LET_{K}$$ and $$LET_{F}^-$$ with rules of propagation of classicality, which are inferences that express how the classicality operator $${\circ }$$ is transmitted from less complex to more complex sentences, and vice-versa. The six-valued semantics here proposed extends the 4 values of Belnap-Dunn logic with 2 more values (...) that intend to represent (positive and negative) reliable information. A six-valued non-deterministic semantics for $$LET_{K}$$ is obtained by means of Nmatrices based on swap structures, and the six-valued semantics for $$LET_{K}^+$$ is then obtained by imposing restrictions on the semantics of $$LET_{K}$$. These restrictions correspond exactly to the rules of propagation of classicality that extend $$LET_{K}$$. The logic $$LET_{F}^+$$ is obtained as the implication-free fragment of $$LET_{K}^+$$. We also show that the 6 values of $$LET_{K}^+$$ and $$LET_{F}^+$$ define a lattice structure that extends the lattice L4 defined by the Belnap-Dunn four-valued logic with the 2 additional values mentioned above, intuitively interpreted as positive and negative reliable information. Finally, we also show that $$LET_{K}^+$$ is Blok-Pigozzi algebraizable and that its implication-free fragment $$LET_{F}^+$$ coincides with the degree-preserving logic of the involutive Stone algebras. (shrink)

Argues that there can be interaction without breaking physical laws: e.g. by basic psychic forces, or by varying physical constants, or especially by arranging fractal trees of physical causation leading to behavior.

Between 1873 and 1876, Felix Klein published a series of papers that he later placed under the rubric anschauliche Geometrie in the second volume of his collected works (1922). The present study attempts not only to follow the course of this work, but also to place it in a larger historical context. Methodologically, Klein’s approach had roots in Poncelet’s principle of continuity, though the more immediate influences on him came from his teachers, Plücker and Clebsch. In the 1860s, Clebsch reworked (...) some of the central ideas in Riemann’s theory of Abelian functions to obtain complicated results for systems of algebraic curves, most published earlier by Hesse and Steiner. These findings played a major role in enumerative geometry, whereas Plücker’s work had a strongly qualitative character that imbued Klein’s early studies. A leitmotif in these works can be seen in the interplay between real curves and surfaces as reflected by their transformational properties. During the early 1870s, Klein and Zeuthen began to explore the possibility of deriving all possible forms for real cubic surfaces as well as quartic curves. They did so using continuity methods reminiscent of Poncelet’s earlier approach. Both authors also relied on visual arguments, which Klein would later advance under the banner of intuitive geometry (anschauliche Geometrie). (shrink)

The thought that empathy plays an important role in moral motivation is almost a platitude of contemporary folk psychology. Parallel themes were mooted in German moral philosophy and aesthetics in the 1700s, and versions of the empathy construct remained prominent in continental accounts of moral motivation through the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. This chapter elucidates the Empathic Motivation Hypothesis (EMH) and sets out some of the conceptual and empirical challenges it faces. It distinguishes empathic concern from other dimensions (...) of empathy (e.g., resonance, attunement, distress, and non-empathic concern) and examines the merits of EMH as a developmental thesis, focusing on evidence from psychopathology and attachment theory. (shrink)

Discusses the rationality of the Christian religion and examines the philosophical arguments for the existence of God.